


The Last Tree

by DjDangerLove



Category: Blade Runner (Movies)
Genre: Family, Fix-It, Hurt/Comfort, K deserves the world, and that's okay, but he gets Deckard instead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-20 12:32:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12432915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DjDangerLove/pseuds/DjDangerLove
Summary: K is the one that needs to recover, but they all need to mend.Blade Runner 2049 Fix-It





	The Last Tree

K dreams of a tree.

Dreams of roots with more memories than he twisting themselves with life force underneath warm ground. Its branches expand up and out growing with time and vitality, the bark cracking with wrinkles like human skin. It’s an old life swaying above a new model, a natural order dancing around a fabricated thing. 

Elongated leaves of green cascade around him, falling into an arrangement light beams of a hologram could never replicate. They are influenced by the wind, pushed and pulled by gentle breezes. He attempts to fathom what that would feel like, what it would mean to be controlled by something other than ones and zeroes and interlinked cells.

He reaches out to touch, synthetic skin to organic life, but they evade him. The leaves swing out wide, riding on the wind to do so rather than be manipulated by it as he’d previously thought. 

What would it be like to not be controlled by anything at all?  
_Interlinked._

He drops his hand back to the ground, splays his arms out wide and imagines the grass prickling his skin when it doesn’t. The ground loosens under his curled fingers, buries up underneath his fingernails and cools between his hands. He blinks up into the tree. Once, twice, three times as it weeps over him. 

Only when he closes his eyes do the leaves brush against his skin, warm and calloused in a pattern he thought them incapable of having. They soothe him and tell him he’s unnaturally warm, but will be cool again. He laughs at that, a bright thing that painfully erupts from somewhere in his belly and somehow he knows that tree is now weeping for him. 

——————

 

Deckard sculpts a tree.

Carves a long, twisting branch for every time he looks up at Joe laying out on the table, only rounding off the edges while sitting with Ana down the hall. He runs his thumb across the last one he smoothed over, feeling for the right place to stick the point of his blade. 

“Don’t put the date,” Ana says, eyes on the world she creates instead of the one around her. “It won’t mean anything to him.”

Her voice brings him out of his work, forcing him to blink tired eyes away from polished wood. He catches sight of his reflection in the separation glass and doesn’t ever remember looking the way he does now. “We should take him to see a real one,” his daughter declares as if there are no limits in the world. “He would like that very much.” He doesn’t remember being a father either. 

 

His reflection is drowned out by a deep sea of green billowing out from branches above Ana’s head. The willow tree sways as she turns the device in her hands, the leaves rustle in a nonexistent wind. She smiles up at him and makes the image of Joe sitting beside her smile up at him too. 

—————

K blinks up and to the left before he’s even aware of his surroundings. 

“Don’t need you to do that.”

His body succumbs to a jolt, limbs overcome with a buzz that stems from the vibrations of a deep voice in his ear. The inflection in the tone is one he can’t comprehend, can’t decode the meaning from. He relays as much, or so he thinks. Maybe he just closes his eyes again. 

“You’ve slept enough, kid. We need to get you up.”

The long branches of the willow tree wrap around him, curl around his arms and cradle the back of his neck. They lift him up, up and out of the dirt until he’s sitting up filthy and straight. Pain flares in his side, but he sighs into it, curves his back with contentment at being made to obey. 

“May not need your code, but I do need to know you’re with me so open ‘em.”

A rough leaf swipes across his right eye smearing what he can only fathom is synthetic blood to his temple while he pries his lashes apart. His vision his blanketed by a tawny hue, one that hadn't been there mere moments ago when he laid underneath the willow. He attempts to drop back, find the greens and the blues from before, but the branches catch him, stop him. 

“You’re alright. Might take a few tries to get your bearings about you, but I did a hell of a patch job. Don’t go messing that up.”

The world spins around him, tawny hue darkening at the edges. He reaches out with a shake in his hands he can’t control. He finds the trunk of the willow, or what should be, but it’s soft and tucks into his fingers when he curls them. 

“Hell, kid. See? This is what _“fine”_ gets you.”

His head drops to the trunk of the tree, pillowed by warmth and a steady thrum of life. The branches clutch him closer in a possessive way he’s never known as a replaceable thing. 

K has always been fine. He’s never been this. 

He says as much, whispers it into the folds of the trunk shielding him from yellow glow of existence. The willow shushes him, drapes leaves against the side of his neck to protect him from the rest of the world. The breeze that rustles them wafts his hair, too. “Same here, Joe. Same here.”

———————

Deckard stares at the tree.

The burnished, bare branches glow in the dim lamp light drooping over it on the bedside table. He’s never known why he’s carved figurines, but he knows how. Knows how to find the right shape of wood, the right size blade. Knows how to design an outline and integrate details. He knows how to do it like he knows how to patch a wound, how to keep somebody on the mend. He can do both, but can never keep either.

 

The first thing he ever carved was that horse. The horse for his child, the one he never got to hold. He tried to convince himself he would have been a terrible father, that he wouldn’t hold them the right way or say all the right things. He wished he _knew_ , though, like everything else. 

The body in his arms falls into him just a bit further and it causes him to look away from the small, carved tree. He slinks his posture to catch the weight despite the ache in his legs from standing in the same spot for too long and the pain in his neck from being draped atop a sweat-matted, dark haired head. 

“I….I’ve always been fine, but I….I’ve never been….this.”

The words are whispered, barely shake the antiseptic air around them but they leave a stain against the front of his shirt. Maybe they soak a bit deeper than that, too, but his gaze falls on the little, carved tree on the nightstand again before he can give it much thought. 

Carving always made his body hurt with nicked fingers, a hunched spine, and tired eyes. He always felt it was worth it though, like the pain somewhere deeper than his bones was somehow etched into a molded piece of wood, but still he never knew why.

At some point in time he gave up on ever knowing, somewhere between Vegas and stiff drink, but then this kid showed up with a serial number and mountain of hope tucked inside his pocket in the shape of a little wooden horse. 

He blows a hush into the hair underneath his chin, hugs Joe a little bit tighter so that the fingers curling into his shirt can cling a bit tighter if they want to. 

_”What do you want?”_ Deckard had asked him back then but he can only care about what he needs now.

He moves his hand to rest against the side of Joe’s fevered neck. Against his palm, a line of puckered skin where he’d cut out the tracker the only thing reminding him that this is the same kid that claimed himself as nothing more than a series of letters and numbers a short time ago. 

Deckard stares at the tree.

With his head propped on the damp hair he’d run a cold, wet rag through for hours on end, he stares at the tree he carved, remembering all the aches and pains it caused him, and all the ones it didn’t. Trembling fingers grasp at him all the more tighter and he begins to think he’ll never carve anything again. 

The first thing he ever carved was for his child he never got to hold. He thinks it would be fitting for the last wooden figure he made to be for the one he did. 

_I’ve always been fine, but I’ve never been this._

Deckard thinks of carving three letters into the base of the tree and his mouth curves upward just a bit. 

“Same here, Joe. Same here.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fandom seems so small, so this is my short attempt at making a "Giving K the family he deserves" contribution to any of you like me that's still not over 2049. Thoughts are welcomed and appreciated.


End file.
